You make smells come through a screen

A message landed a week or so back and I have not been able to put it down.

It opened the way a lot of them open. Hey mate, thank you, you blokes bring a bit of joy and a laugh. I get those and I am grateful for every one. Then it kept going.

“Somehow you make smells come through a screen. I can smell the beach in 1980 and sauce on a sausage roll from school tuck shop.”

It came from a pastor at a small church north of Brissy. He told me he is always going on about back in the day, so the series was right up his alley. Then he said the part that got me.

For him it was not only memories of his childhood. It was a reminder of his new nationality and his new country. He came here from South America. He said he sits there smiling weirdly while his family watches Lego Masters, and a tear runs down his cheek.

Bless you and your team, he wrote.

I read that one about four times.

I get asked fairly often, and not always kindly, whether this is just a gimmick. AI videos. A trick. Something that is going to look embarrassing in two years.

I understand the question. I have asked it of myself, usually around 11pm when a render has failed for the third time and I am sitting there wondering what exactly I am doing with my evening.

Here is where I have landed after nearly a year of it.

The tool made the picture. The tool did not make the memory. That was already in him, sitting there since 1980, waiting for something to knock on the door. I did not put the smell of a sausage roll in that man’s head. I found the door and I knocked.

That is not a gimmick. That is the oldest job there is.

The other one came in at ten to one in the morning, which tells you something before you even read it.

A bloke who grew up in the nineties wrote to say the videos had made him nostalgic for his childhood. Then he wrote this. Nineties him never thought he would end up taking stress leave from a professional job, or struggling to pay a mortgage on two incomes with no kids.

Then he apologised for it. Said it was probably too much information.

It was not too much information. It was the whole thing.

He was not writing to me about a video. He was writing about the distance between the kid he was and the man he is now, and a thirty second clip had put those two blokes in the same room for a minute. That is what he was actually thanking me for.

I am not going to pretend I engineered that, because I did not. But I know what it is. I have felt it myself, and it is the reason I have not stopped.

Nostalgia gets treated as a soft thing. Sentimental. Looking backwards because the present is too hard to look at.

I do not think that is what is going on in these messages.

Neither of those men was asking to go back. The pastor was using 1980 to make sense of where he lives now. The bloke on stress leave was using the 90s to work out how he got here. They were using the past as a measuring stick, not a hiding place. One of them was measuring how far he had travelled and feeling grateful, the other was measuring the same distance and feeling winded, and both of those are honest responses to a life.

That is why I keep going. Not because the videos are clever, plenty of them are not. Because the memory on the other end is real, and because for a minute somebody gets to stand next to who they used to be.

I have made a lot of these now. Some are good. A few are genuinely rubbish and I have left them up anyway, because quietly deleting the misses would be its own kind of dishonest.

What has changed in twelve months is not the tool. The tool got better and it will keep getting better and that is the least interesting part of this.

What changed is that I stopped thinking of the video as the thing I make. The video is the knock. What happens behind the door was never mine, it belongs to whoever answers it, and it was sitting in there long before I turned up.

So I am going to keep knocking.

Sammy

P.S. If one of these has ever put you back somewhere specific, a street, a shop, a smell, hit reply and tell me where it took you. I read every single one, and almost a year in they are still the best part of this.

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